SLAAK a futures agencyhttp://www.slaak.biz
Thu, 29 Nov 2018 20:53:40 +0000en-UShourly182646845the Automagic Cityhttp://www.slaak.biz/the-automagic-city/
Fri, 02 Nov 2018 10:45:34 +0000http://www.slaak.biz/?p=894Science fiction author Arthur C Clarke once said that extremely advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Today, technology is so complex that even those clever enough to get how it works will understand only a fraction of everything it can do.read the manifesto...

editors note: This is the authoritative version of the Automagic City Manifesto. Published with kind permission from the authors. The first published version had one sentence altered for it to work better in the context of the Urban ICT Arena communication.

Welcome to the Automagic City

Science fiction author Arthur C Clarke once said that extremely advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Today, technology is so complex that even those clever enough to get how it works will understand only a fraction of everything it can do. Some people even claim that technology can do anything you could possibly imagine. This isn’t true, but it certainly is true that advanced technology can do many things you never would have thought possible – a lot like magic.

The difference between tech and magic is that many of us lack the tools for imagining the workings of tech and all that is possible. With magic, it’s the other way around – we can easily imagine how we would use magic to fulfill our wishes but not how magic is created or controlled. So why don’t we simply use our magic mental tools and apply them on tech? One step in this direction would be to stop using terms such as smart, connected, viable, expanding and sustainable when we talk about the kind of city we want to live in.

]]>894Why write the Automagic City manifesto?http://www.slaak.biz/why-write-the-automagic-city-manifesto/
Thu, 01 Nov 2018 11:00:41 +0000http://www.slaak.biz/?p=897“How do we change this?” was the question. Or more accurate: “How do we change this with minimal effort?” The minimal effort part of the question was critical for two reasons. First, there was a severe shortage on resources. Second, changing the future is hard, really hard. Unless you can find a situation where everything is in place and just needs a small nudge to get going. Then it’s easy.read more...

It started with an uneasy feeling that real innovation wasn’t happening, We were working on establishing the Urban ICT Arena in Stockholm. The Arena is an open testbed for Smart City technology and Smart City business models, and for Internet of Things technology in general. After several years on the operational management committee it was getting obvious that no one anywhere in the world seemed to have a clue about what Internet of Things and Smart Cities could actually do for humanity.

Change the future with minimal effort?

“How do we change this?” was the question. Or more accurate: “How do we change this with minimal effort?” The minimal effort part of the question was critical for two reasons. First, there was a severe shortage on resources. Second, changing the future is hard, really hard. Unless you can find a situation where everything is in place and just needs a small nudge to get going. Then it’s easy.

Analysing the situation

After analyzing the situation we concluded that Stockholm as a city had all the things needed in place. The City administration and the surrounding municipalities were clearly interested in the next level of innovation. The workforce in Stockholm is exceptional and all the competence needed is available in abundance. Stockholm also has a vibrant startup scene with a track record of generating several unicorn companies. And lots of companies, big and small, new and old, were doing lots of things within the area of Internet of Things and Smart Cities. Just not anything really interesting. Final, the population is very tech savvy and will embrace any useful new technology fast.
Also we had built up Urban ICT Arena to a level where we had direct access to lots of influencers inside relevant organizations. Which meant we had a platform we could use as a force multiplier.

Further investigations showed that only a certain group of technologists had any understanding of what Internet of Things technology could do. But they didn’t have any useful visions to work with. The situation was similar within Smart Cities. Business developers were struggling to get beyond the ideas that cities needed to invest in network infrastructure and could save some money in their technical administration. Mainly by digitalizing and centralizing city systems management. Things a city like Stockholm did decades ago.

Changing perception with a better name

Stockholm is full of idea-people who can take almost any new research or invention and turn it into useful products and services. But these people worked on something else and didn’t see the relevance in neither Internet of Things nor Smart Cities. Deep interviews we did clearly demonstrated that “Internet” was seen as a 20 year old buzzword for a revolution already happened. And “Smart” was seen as a buzzword from the 1980th representing outdated fashion. So we needed a new name, a new buzzword. And we would be competing with attention from buzzwords like “sustainable”, “food tech”, “social entrepreneur”, now hot.

Asking ourselves questions: “What is a city full with these technologies?”, “What is the end goal?”, “How is the citizen experience?” We eventually came up with a list of names that looked like “automatic city” “magical city” and none of these worked. “Automatic” was a buzzword older than 70 years and “magical” would be seen as either fantasy or new age. But smashing them together into “automagic” created a completely new name with potential.

Use art to create meaning

Words, names, brands and buzzwords don’t just take off by themselves and get used. First you must fill them with meaning, so that the word represents something attractive. And we wanted to do this in a way that communicated with the most creative, knowledgeable and intelligent idea-people out there. There is only one way to do this fast and efficiently, you create art. Art of the type we wanted would function as a seed for divergent creative idea work done by a manifold of people. The simplest art form to create such art is the art of manifesto writing.

Remembering that Rasmus and Erika had written something similar, years ago, Rasmus found a short text from 2002 in the SLAAK company server archive. The topic was “Magic as a useful metaphor for designing technology.” The text was basically the manifesto we wanted. It mostly needed two things, a change of title and a list of experiences representing the idea of the Automagic City.
By actually using magic as a metaphor for coming up with ideas for the list we soon had more on the list than we needed. Also proving that the manifesto was a useful tool for idea generation.

Planting the seed of the Automagic City

We published the Automagic City Manifesto on Urban ICT Arenas website on 2 December 2017. A year later we can see how it is constantly transforming more and more people’s thinking about the next IT revolution about to happen.

]]>897How to license the Automagic City manifesto?http://www.slaak.biz/licensing-the-automagic-city-manifesto/
Thu, 01 Nov 2018 10:55:48 +0000http://www.slaak.biz/?p=898Can I quote parts of the Automagic City Manifesto?
Can I use the awesome illustrations?
Can I publish the complete Automagic City Manifesto?read answers...

Can I quote parts of the Automagic City Manifesto?

Yes, in a text where you discuss the Automagic City Manifesto you can without hesitation quote a small part of it. However, don’t forget to also mention the authors names.

We also would appreciate if you included a link to either its first publishing site and/or to this site.

exampel

Quote “The Automagic City is a city where noisy machines respect your wishes when you ask them to be quiet.”
from The Automagic City by Rasmus Larsson, Petra Dalunde & Erika Lockne

The whole manifesto is found at http://www.slaak.biz/the-automagic-city/
A special version of it was first published at http://www.urbanictarena.se/the-automagic-city/

Can I use the awesome illustrations?

You can if you license them. All the illustrations accompanying the Automagic City Manifesto are copyright Erika Lockne and Cubby’s Going Home.

If you go to www.cubbysgoinghome.se you will find even more suitable illustrations and contact information. You can license most published illustrations. This is the best alternative if you are in a hurry. Or license illustrations tailored to your particular publishing need. The later will take some time to carry out and will be more expensive.

Can I publish the complete Automagic City Manifesto?

You can if you license it. The Automagic City Manifesto is copyright Rasmus Larsson, Petra Dalunde &amp: Erika Lockne and can be licensed through SLAAK.

The licensing fee is different depending on media, reach, publishing format and purpose. If you want to license The Automagic City Manifesto for publishing, contact us at rasmus@slaak.biz and state how and where you want to publish it. If you also want to license the awesome illustrations together with it, we can handle the complete licensing package through SLAAK.

exampel

Hi
I’m interested in licensing the publishing rights of The Automagic City Manifesto for a book about city planning with 10 different authors. The book will be in German and published in Germany and used as literature for students in city planning and we expect to print a first edition of 2000 copies. We also would like to discuss a potential translation of it to German.

Or

Hi
We’re interested in licensing the publishing rights of The Automagic City Manifesto and the awesome illustrations for a feature section about the future of Cities in the monthly magazine Global Issues with a distributed edition of 540.000 copies worldwide and a web edition with 1.9 M unique readers globally.

Or

Hi,
We’re looking at producing a 45 minutes popular science TV show about Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and How it will change cities. One idea we have is to have a speaker voice reading sections of the Automagic City Manifesto while a 3D animation shows the experience. And then have experts discussing and demonstrating how it can be done. Repeating the format over and over making the Automagic City Manifesto the unifying element driving the narrative forward. We’re at an early stage but want to know the conditions for securing an option to license with a royalty sharing deal.

]]>786blog: Asimov and Psychohistoryhttp://www.slaak.biz/asimov-and-psychohistory/
Mon, 24 Sep 2018 10:39:39 +0000http://www.slaak.biz/?p=768Some time ago in a meeting I was describing how we have methods to find chaotic points, in the present and in the near future, where it's possible to use very small resources to change the general direction of the future. One participant interrupts me with "But that's like Asimov*s Psychohistory!" and I respond with "Yeah ..." and try to continue talking but he interrupts me again with "But don't you get it? you're saying you have invented Psychohistory! Psychohistory!!!" and I'm thinking "I wish we had...". I say "Yes, we have." because I know that if I don't...read more...

]]>Some time ago in a meeting I was describing how we have methods to find chaotic points, in the present and in the near future, where it’s possible to use very small resources to change the general direction of the future. One participant interrupts me with “But that’s like Asimov*s Psychohistory!” and I respond with “Yeah …” and try to continue talking but he interrupts me again with “But don’t you get it? you’re saying you have invented Psychohistory! Psychohistory!!!” and I’m thinking “I wish we had…”. I say “Yes, we have.” because I know that if I don’t he won’t stop until I agree that’s what we have done. And then I say “But it doesn’t work the way Asimov described it. The Mathematics are chaotic and it’s not possible to predict thousands of years into the future. It’s not even possible to predict consequences a hundred years into the future. Chaos creates a kind of event horizon that makes it impossible to see beyond a certain time. And depending on what you are researching the event horizon is at different time places.”.

I hate killing such enthusiasm for what we do. I can very much relate to that enthusiasm, because some 40 years ago I really wanted to invent psychohistory. But what we did was to create something much better. We created tools to investigate the present NOW and to explore the possibilities for everyone to create their own part of the future. And we killed Asimov’s vision of a centralized secret organization that manipulates events thousands of years in the future. Much the same way that Asimov himself killed it in the end of the last book by having one individual execute free will. Imagine a world where billions of people do that all the time. That’s what we are studying, because that’s what reality looks like.

]]>768SLAAKhttp://www.slaak.biz/slaak/
Mon, 24 Sep 2018 00:48:23 +0000http://www.slaak.biz/?p=425SLAAK was founded by Rasmus Larsson and Erika Lockne in Stockholm, Sweden 2004. SLAAK started as a research laboratory based around internet enabled methods for trendspotting, futures research and futures strategy. These methods where something Rasmus had started developing in 1996 as a management team member at Wognum Art, an internet strategy and design agency.read more...

SLAAK is a futures research laboratory and futures strategy consulting agency. We have over 20 years of experience in futures research and futures strategy.

Our methods are unique and very useful. They have a solid foundation in mathematics, social anthropology, modeling and simulation, intelligence analysis and complex systems theory. Most of our methods are proprietary and owned by founders Rasmus Larsson and Erika Lockne.

History

SLAAK was founded by Rasmus Larsson and Erika Lockne in Stockholm, Sweden 2004. SLAAK started as a research laboratory based around internet enabled methods for trendspotting, futures research and futures strategy. These methods where something Rasmus had started developing in 1996 as a management team member at Wognum Art, an internet strategy and design agency.

The history of SLAAK goes even further back to the early 1980s when Rasmus decided to write about Futures Research Theory as the theme for his high school exam paper. As a result he spent every evening during 6 months reading everything ever written about Futures Research Theory. And eventually realized three things:

1. Futures Research is not and cannot be a science in a strict meaning.

2. Those authors who have the best insights into the theory of Futures Research have absolutely no useful tools for doing meaningful futures research.

3. Those authors who do have useful and meaningful tools for futures research are either creative science fiction authors or experts in modelling and simulation.

This started a quest for better methods for futures research, a quest well into its fourth decade by now.